You bring up good points, for sure. I don't understand the routing algorithms details, so you could be totally on point. When I get to these state routes in my progress through all of them (still doing US routes right now), I'll concentrate on them more.

FYI, did you notice that the most updated layer on the US livemap is no longer the closest zoom level, but one higher than that?

I heard back from Support today and they have fixed the problem with this routing. The reason for not being able to find a route, according to Dror, is interesting and now I need to get some help from the megamappers in terms of what you remember from the meetup about route pruning, road type preferences for route distance, etc. I haven't gotten that part in my recording, so I don't have notes about it yet.

Basically the issue was that the short route (going south and then West) is built of mainly Seconday highway, and since this goes for almost the entire route, waze tried to avoid it and find an alternative - however, the alternative (Which is currently displayed when you search for it) is a very long one and so it failed to find an alternative and this failed the entire search. We fixed it now.

AlanOfTheBerg wrote:I heard back from Support today and they have fixed the problem with this routing. The reason for not being able to find a route, according to Dror, is interesting and now I need to get some help from the megamappers in terms of what you remember from the meetup about route pruning, road type preferences for route distance, etc. I haven't gotten that part in my recording, so I don't have notes about it yet.

Not much detail was given other than Primary Road wasn't one of the road types that were considered for the middle portion of long routes. Assuming we're typing all state highway/routes as Minor, then IMO Primary Road *should* be considered and valued as a minor highway.

As far as pruning goes, I would imagine that at some point a route that's following along a Minor will prune before a route following along Major which will prune before a route following Freeway. What those thresholds are is probable a business secret and we won't know more than Minor < Major < Freeway.

Maybe we need to rethink how we type Major and Minor again and go more for what the road looks like, functions as, and capacity instead of going by US vs State numbered.

WeeeZer14 wrote:From the meetup, I only remember that "primary roads" were Freeway, Major Hwy, and Minor Hwy (and maybe ramps?). That is when we learned that Primary Street wasn't getting any preference over Street.

I'm pretty sure ramps are considered primary roads, else we wouldn't have had the ramp-to-ramp traffic bypassing issue.

More from Dror, after I asked if there was a map problem or if this was a routing server parameter change:

Basically, the parameter says to ignore an alternative due to a couple of reasons. Everything is based on theresholds, and in this case, the threshold for driving on freeway vs. driving on lower-speed roads caused the issue, so we changed it and made sure it will not fail the whole route.

So it wasn't road type so much as road speed which caused the routes to be "pruned" or "failed."

WeeeZer14 wrote:From the meetup, I only remember that "primary roads" were Freeway, Major Hwy, and Minor Hwy (and maybe ramps?). That is when we learned that Primary Street wasn't getting any preference over Street.

This is really strange to me, because there are 3 streets around me that I've changed from regular to primary street over time, and whenever I changed one, it started recommending it as an alternate route, where it never routed me that way before. Happened every time I 'upgraded' a street.